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Ruth Bancroft, like so many gardeners, pushed the zonal envelope when it came to plant selection. After a freak freeze event in 1972 that destroyed the newly planted garden, Ruth chalked it up to experience, acquired more plants and devised and built covers to protect the most vulnerable. Last weekend I attended an 8am photo workshop at the garden, and Ruths' winter-shrouded shade structure provided a pleasant diffuse light for photography.

Here we see the cover from outside..

As the morning light shifted the scene outside the structure continued to change.

Inside a soft glow bathed the plants.

The trees outside the cover etched a pattern that furnished a background to the plant portraits.

The smaller plants were pleasantly lit with no harsh shadows

Many thanks to John Ricca , Richard Valenti and the management of the garden that make events like this happen. The next photo workshop is April 1st.

Les at Tidewater Gardener has posted his annual meme challenging other garden bloggers to present their 10 favorite photos of the year. I was surprised to find I have 3779 images in my photo files for 2016; I probably ought to do my annual winter image clean-up since many are sub-par or near duplicates and just eat up space on my external hard drive. It was actually fun to go through them all and try to pick out 10, it brought up great memories of gardens and landscapes visited, and reminded me that there were actually some positive aspects of 2016. These are not necessarily the best, but they are those that have meaning for me.

This was taken in April at a wetlands trail in south Napa County. Napa is known for wine, vines and food, but we have a beautiful network of wetlands that feed into the San Pablo Bay and to some extent reach east to the Sacramento River Delta. I have really neglected the rich photography opportunities here and hope to capture more in 2017.